James Whitley (Cardiff University)
The study of political communities in Archaic and Classical Crete is no longer a neglected field within ancient history and classical archaeology. Several monographs, archaeological (Wallace 2010), epigraphic (Gagarin and Perlman 2016) and historical (Seelentag 2015) attest to its relevance to wider interdisciplinary debates in the study of the ancient Mediterranean. The study of Cretan poleis now provides a useful counter-narrative to the excessive concentration on Athens and Sparta as the only political communities worthy of study. The study of such communities does however throw up a major difficulty when looked at in comparative terms. For many political scientists (e.g. Berent 2000) and anthropological archaeologists (e.g. Flannery and Marcus 2012) poleis in general lack many of the features they expect of states. Since Cretan poleis are in general much smaller than the average (49 having an average territory 170.12 km2; Perlman 2004) this problem is more acute in the Cretan case (Whitley 2014; 2019). Recent attempts to deal with this difficulty by historians of the ‘Utrecht school’ (Blok 2017; Van den Eijnde et al. 2018) by emphasising the relationship between commensality and citizenship, characterising Greek poleis as ‘covenants between gods and men’ (in Blok’s phrase), do not fully address the Cretan case. In Crete evidence for communal feasts in sanctuaries are not as clear cut as they are on the mainland. This paper seeks to resolve this problem by looking again at the material evidence for Cretan institutions and commensal practices. Illustrative examples will be taken from both Knossos and Eastern Crete.